The sick left

The Re-Elect Trump 2020 campaign is off to a great start in the streets of many American cities and college campuses right now. As someone sagely commented, the left’s reaction to Trump’s election is one of the reasons Trump won the election. Rioters in Portland, Oregon, acted out the overdone metaphor of 2016 by setting an actual dumpster fire. Gotta give ‘em style points for that. It’s another great sign »

The left has a simple refrain about Trump: he’s an authoritarian fascist, provoking violence and lawlessness. Why is it, then, that it is only Trump signs that are being vandalized, as this CNN report explains: For that matter, when was the last time conservatives shouted down a speaker on a college campus? Or demanded censorship of speech or a “safe space”? As we’ve noted before, if liberals didn’t have double »

Bryan Burrough’s book Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence was published in paperback this past April. I read the book when it came out in hardcover last year and flipped over it. I recommend it highly to Power Line readers. Trying to copy Jay Nordlinger’s approach in his Impromptus columns at NR, I wrote about the book in “Notes on Days »

One of the most sinister developments of our time is the Left’s use of both criminal investigation and mob harassment to suppress dissent. An outrageous instance of this trend is the effort by 20 Democratic state Attorneys General to investigate ExxonMobil and others for criminal “fraud,” i.e., carrying out research that doesn’t support the hysterical exaggerations of the Climatistas. One of the leaders of this attempt to suppress scientific debate »

After years of complaining that America’s paper money featured only dead white guys, a lot of folks on the Left are in a snit that Harriet Tubman is going to replace Andrew Jackson on the face of the twenty-dollar bill. You can practically hear them: “We didn’t mean a gun-toting, Bible-believing Republican black woman! We meant Angela Davis!” Take in someone who goes by the name “Feminista Jones” (described as »

The prominent novelist Ian McEwan is generally among the bien pensants, though he has previously betrayed a vulnerability to guilty thoughts. He is actually a repeat offender when it comes to violating the proliferating orthodoxies enforced in the circles to which he belongs. Today McEwan presents as a case study. McEwan demonstrates how easy it is to transgress against the rapidly evolving orthodoxies of the increasingly fascist left. Spiked editor »

During last night’s debate, in response to a question about the rough treatment of some protesters at his rallies, Donald Trump said “we have some protesters who are bad dudes, they have done bad things.” Trump added: They are swinging, they are really dangerous and they get in there and start hitting people. And we had a couple big, strong, powerful guys doing damage to people — not only the »

In the latest installment of instruction from Prager University, George Will provides the short course A Progressive’s Guide to Political Correctness (video below, about six minutes). It’s part PC for Dummies and part satire a la A Modest Proposal. Will proposes renaming a number of cites to conform to the operative requirements of PC doctrine, resulting in a song that would have to go by “I Left My Heart in »

“Arma virumque cano,” writes Vergil in the opening of the Aeneid (“Arms and the man I sing”). In a footnote to the Black Lives Matter disgrace yesterday, Minneapolis now gives us a creep and a council member, Cano — Alondra Cano. “Daughter of the Third World Feminist movement…Im/migrant,” as she describes herself, alluding to her childhood in Mexico (though she was born in Minnesota). She’s recently back from Barcelona on »

That should be a question like, Is the Pope Catholic? But in fact, it is by no means obvious that the American Civil Liberties Union consistently favors civil liberties. Some years ago the ACLU called me to ask for a contribution. I said that I was particularly interested in Second Amendment rights, and asked what the ACLU had done on that front lately. (This was before I even owned a »

I wrote here and here about the current racial turmoil at Harvard Law School. On Friday, the law school’s dean, Martha Minow, convened a meeting of students, faculty and others that drew a crowd of more than a thousand, with hundreds more in an overflow room. A group called Coalition for Racial Justice at HLS has posted audio clips of the meeting. One leftist after another took the microphone to »

With its Fall 2015 number, the Claremont Review of Books celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. It has rolled out a new site. It has sent its characteristically excellent new issue off to the printer. And it has let me dip in to the issue to select a few pieces to bring to the attention of Power Line readers. (Subscription services are accessible via the CRB home page linked above — a »

I think we can say with confidence, at least 27%. Rasmussen Reports asked likely U.S. voters whether the government should criminally prosecute those who don’t go along with the global warming scare. This was the precise question: Should the government investigate and prosecute scientists and others including major corporations who question global warming? In response, 27% of Democrats called for prosecuting global warming realists. (Remarkably, 11% of Republicans did, too.) »

Margaret Thatcher stopped Britain’s slide into poverty and irrelevance, and the British Left has never forgiven her. So when someone–her heirs or estate, I assume–offered a collection of her clothing to the Victoria & Albert Museum, which has a huge fashion collection and has often exhibited various sorts of clothes, the V&A declined: A range of items that belonged to Margaret Thatcher are to be sold at auction after the »

If anti-free speech demonstrators shout down a speaker at the University of Minnesota, where do you read about it? In the Washington Post, apparently: On Tuesday afternoon an Israeli academic was shouted down by two dozen protesters as he tried to begin a lecture before about 100 students and faculty at the University of Minnesota. The speaker was Moshe Halbertal, a professor at NYU Law School and a professor of »

I’m not the first to argue that for the left, the greatest attraction of climate change is the opportunity for authoritarianism it provides. Today’s exhibit is this tweet from a twit over in Britain: Advice for Mr. Rendall: Bring it on, bro. Over here in Second Amendment America, you won’t get very far with that program. »

A faithful reader writes from Halifax: “In our current federal election, marked by media hostility to the Conservative government at levels unprecedented in recent Canadian history, a leading candidate of the Opposition New Democratic Party (actually to the Left of Bernie Sanders) in Hamilton, Ontario has claimed that she’d never heard of Auschwitz. This after having made a tasteless joke about pictures [of Auschwitz]. Even worse she is the Vice-Chair »